How to Write A Love Letter

An Interview with Corey Van Landingham

Sharp, timely, and expansive in the cultural, political, and emotional terrain it covers, Corey Van Landingham’s Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens (Tupelo Press 2022) is a moving collection that speaks to current societal issues while unveiling daily, intimate moments that welcome readers to probe further into the complexities of the world. 

In addition to her newest collection, Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.

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Esteban Rodriguez: Thank you so much for your time, Corey. I appreciate it. I want to first start by speaking about place in Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens. There are various themes the speakers in this book navigate: love, loss, death, war, the longing for connection across a variety of geographies. But in the backdrop, readers can always find a city, state, or country emerging, even if it appears momentarily. From California to Rome to Manhattan and Pakistan, we are never not situated near a specific location. Can you speak about the inclusion of these places in certain poems and how you see and think of them within the context of this collection? 

Corey Van Landingham: Thanks for this question, Esteban, and for your time and care with Love Letter!

 I’m glad these poems feel rooted in place, because place was incredibly important for the origins of this book.

 I moved to Oakland, California in 2013, about a month before my first book was published. While I’m originally from Southern Oregon, I had been living in Houston the year before my move, and in Indiana for three years before that, so California was a significant new landscape to fall for, but also to contend with. Of course, it’s stunning—the California light is its own hue, contains this totally different aura. I was living in the smallest studio apartment I’ve ever seen, but the top of my apartment building had a balcony overlooking Lake Merritt where I’d just spend hours looking, and I walked for miles and miles every day. I had never felt so intimately, physically tied to a place in my adult life.

But the Bay Area was also unsettling. Part of this had to do with the onslaught of the tech industry, and part of this had to do with spending time in Palo Alto, on Stanford’s campus, where one minute you’re walking past a Rodin sculpture while the next you’re looking up at the Hoover Institute—literally, the library of war is looming over you. More than anything, though, it was that famed Californian sense of newness that affected me. A feeling of novelty that bled into the culture there. Part of it was thrilling, feeling like you’re on the edge of something. But part of it was unsettling, feeling cut off from history, from the past.

 That’s a long-winded way to get to the fact that not only place, but the strata of place—the geological, cultural, historical layers—felt for the first time almost physically palpable. I guess it’s only natural that it would change my approach to poetry, and that even poems that aren’t grounded in California became informed by what that place had to teach me about looking closer, deeper, about a form of attention that feels almost like excavation.

 After I left California, I moved to Gettysburg, so you can imagine how that only deepened this—sensitivity? Perplexity? 

ER: When I speak with friends from overseas not accustomed to the geographical diversity of the United States, they are always surprised at how vastly different one part can be from the other. Can you elaborate on this Californian newness you encountered and to the extent it benefited or impacted your writing? 

CVL: That’s so true—not even just within the United States but within a single state! The newness, it was more of a feeling, an aura, that perhaps inflected the landscape but didn’t necessarily stem from it. Standing atop a cliff in Big Sur you can feel like you’re at the edge of the world, but it isn’t the land that’s new, of course, it’s the tone of the place. It’s difficult to divorce that feeling from westward expansion, the violent mindset of manifest destiny. And so this newness, like most myth, is both seductive and dangerous, both meaning-making and false.

 As far as how it impacted my writing, I think it did a great deal. It was that impression of novelty I kept experiencing in the Bay Area that made me want, instead, to go back to the start of things, to origins of language, of love, of violence, whether public or private.

 So while the militarization of the drone at one point felt like something almost out of science fiction, a couple of poems in this book attempt to follow it back to the beginning—“The Eye of God” starts by tracking a kind of evolution of ballistics, for instance.

ER: “The Eye of God” begins tracking the evolution of ballistics, but in “Bad Intelligence,” we see the way in which these simple arms have morphed into full-fledged modern warfare:  

Pixelated, on a clear day, a shovel may resemble 
a rifle. A woman is always a civilian, by definition, 

and data. And data (416-957 civilians 
in Pakistan) will not be updated. The ability 

to loiter for longer along the largely erased 
border will further, we are certain, 
American interests. 

The inclusion of poems like “Bad Intelligence” (which I believe are quite necessary for any reader), appear, on the surface, to contradict the more “cheery” – if you will – disposition of the title of the collection. Was this intentional, and how did you see these poems interacting with others in the book? 

I had more to learn in that intimate interaction than pure condemnation.

CVL: I’m so glad you asked this, because talking and writing about the book, it’s so easy for me to focus on the poems and ideas that seem to hold more gravitas—the militarization of the drone, the death of my father, the violent origins of love, desire. But tone is one of the most important things for me, as a writer, and I wanted, in this book, to expand my tonal range. While there are moments of humor, of some levity, in Antidote, much of it is quite self-serious. I remember meeting with Marianne Boruch during the first year of my MFA. She was giving me notes on my poems (mostly elegies for my father), and she said, “Corey, you’re a funny person. Why aren’t your poems ever funny?” That kind of baffled me at the moment, and I think I even bristled. It took me a long time to metabolize her comment, but I’m glad I did. In a sense, she wanted to see more of me in my poems, and less me putting on what I think a poem sounded like. Antidote is very sad-girl poet. And while I’m certainly that some of the time, thankfully that’s not all I am. So the attitude toward my subjects in Love Letter had to shift more—if there’s any arc, I think it’s one of tone, one of stance.

 Part of my question, when writing this book—and just trying to figure out my daily life as someone who writes and reads and thinks and votes and loves—is how to write a love letter to something, someone, that you fear, with whom you disagree, that hurts you or others. Not that we need to love everything, everyone, but that maybe I had more to learn in that intimate interaction than pure condemnation. I also think of it as a reversal of power, and that’s something that art has a unique ability to do. Through exquisite attention, through a porous, capacious appraisal of what we don’t understand, I think poetry can destabilize rigid systems of power. Sometimes this requires laughter. Sometimes tenderness. Sometimes skepticism. Sometimes rage. The wonderful thing about a collection of poems is that you can move through all of these attitudes. Not that a collection has to do this. There are many books I love that feel like they cannot crawl out of their well of sadness. But I wanted a book that feels like it reflects a prismatic, human presence, as it is dealing with so much that tries to dehumanize us.

ER: As you spoke of love and your purpose of attempting to write a love letter to someone you fear, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the following lines in the title poem in your first collection: 

   Given against 

brevity, the inclination to run, your 
ability to pin me there and there and 

there, proclaiming your love, all your 
unbearable love, all that love you feel 

when you’re cleaning your gun right 
in front of me to counteract some 

proclamation of I’m leaving you or 
I left you a long time ago or Don’t. 

Antidote and Love Letter no doubt reflect that attempt to grapple with that which tries to dehumanize us. Do you foresee this continuing in your work? Are you working on anything new at the moment? 

CVL: Oh, I love that connection between Antidote and Love Letter—I had mostly seen some topical connections (love poems, elegies), and a lot of differences (I hope), but you’re right that in its own way Antidote addresses similar issues of power and fear. 

I was about to say that my next manuscript doesn’t quite tackle the same issues, but you’ve made me pause and see how, in some ways, it does. This new manuscript is organized around the first years of a new marriage. It’s called Reader, I, and it draws its title and animating framework from the famous-to-the-point-of-cliché phrase in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “Reader, I married him.” The poems blur Brontë’s protagonist with a transgressive, contemporary speaker who both courts and eschews nuptial myths, who grapples with a world of husbands and fathers, patriarchal nations and structures. In a sense, Reader, I envisions domestic life as a metaphor for civic life, and vice versa. 

But it’s easy to just do the “isn’t marriage bad?” poem. I mean, there are definitely plenty of those in the collection, but, perhaps like poetry itself, it’s more interesting for me to find possibilities within constraint. 

I’ve just started work on the real “what’s next”—it’s probably too soon to say it’s the start of a fourth collection, but the poems have been strangely liberating in that I’ve made the decision (for now) not to be featured in any “I” that appears in the book. There are persona poems, historical accounts, but I’m trying to mostly scrub the poems of “me.” As a poem near the end of Reader, I says, “I am sick of I.” I need a break! 

ER: Like many eager readers of your poetry, I’m thrilled to hear news that a new collection is in the works! But to conclude, I’d like to draw our attention to the concluding lines in the title poem (and last) in the collection: 

And, when the wingèd gods finally interfere 
with your possessor’s enjoyment, to an

indefinite extent, I’ll remember a time when
men were the ones doing harm with

their own hands. I’ll remember the words I once 
had to give to you, on the porch, in private.

What words would you like left behind for you? 

CVL: I would like something I can return to and see anew, words that will not only change my vision of them, but that will change—through their meaning, through their music—my vision outside of them. That’s what the poetry I most cherish does.